Generations United Podcast Generations United

From the vaults!  Check out Generations United's webinar on the importance of cultural responsiveness in intergenerational programming. This virtual event held in August 2022 and made possible with support from the RRF Foundation for Aging, was co-hosted by the National Indian Child Welfare Association and the National Caucus and Center on Black Aging and included examples of organizations bringing younger and older people together in diverse communities and provided practical recommendations for designing programs and activities that reflect different cultural norms and values.

About the Speakers
This event was facilitated by Dr. Sarah Kastelic (Alutiiq), Executive Director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association, and featured opening remarks from Generations United's Executive Director Donna Butts.  They are joined by Marva Overton, the Executive Director of the Alliance for African American Health in Central Texas who operates Inter-generational Gardening Soul to Soul, a program that brings youth and elders together to construct and maintain vegetable gardens; Dr. Danica Brown (Choctaw) the Behavioral Health Director at the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board, a non-profit tribal advisory organization serving the 43 federally-recognized tribes of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho and Katherine Kim the Program Director for the Koreatown Storytelling Program, a multimedia oral history that brings together high school journalists and community elders from the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.
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A few months ago, Generations United released our latest set of free resources—developed with support from RRF Foundation for Aging—aimed to strengthen and expand intergenerational programs. The publications—Making the Case for Intergenerational Programs, Fact Sheet: Intergenerational Programs Benefit Everyone, and Staying Connected While Staying Apart: Intergenerational Programs & the COVID-19 Pandemic—support the growing field of practice by increasing the knowledge and skills of people working to connect and support older adults, children, and youth.

Mary O'Donnell, president of RRF, joined our Executive Director Donna Butts and Ernest Gonzales, Ph.D., who led the development of Generations United's new resources. Dr. Gonzales is also an associate professor and director of the MSW Program at NYU Silver School of Social Work. 

This episode focuses on how the RRF Foundation for Aging came to include intergenerational programs in their funding priorities and what the Foundation has learned about intergenerational programs. The episode also explores what Dr. Gonzales and his research team learned while creating the intergenerational tools. 

Other resources mentioned during this interview include:
Encore.org's The Power of Connecting the GenerationsGenerations United's Stronger Together: Funders Call to InnovationGrantmakers in Aging's Intergenerational Strategies Ohio State University's College of Social Work's Implementation of Evidence-Base Practices in Intergenerational Programming: A Scoping ReviewVisit gu.org for additional resources. Support the show

 A new study from Generations United, Family Matters: Multigenerational Living Is on the Rise and Here to Stay, finds that the number of Americans living in a multigenerational household with three or more generations has nearly quadrupled over the past decade, with a dramatic increase of 271 percent from 2011 to 2021 (7 percent vs. 26 percent).  Our report found that 66 percent of those living in a multigenerational household say the economic climate was a factor in their living arrangement. Among the top reported causes, 34 percent said the need for eldercare was a reason and 34% said childcare was a reason.

In this episode—Larry Nisenson, senior vice president and chief commercial officer of Genworth's U.S. Life Insurance Division—joins Generations United's Executive Director Donna Butts to discuss his own role as a caregiver to his parents, ways employee caregivers can advocate for resources, and how employers can support employee caregivers.

"The best we can do as the advocates for caregivers is try and tell that story and arm the emerging caregiver with all of the tools and help we can provide for them to make that burden as easy as we can." —Larry Nisenson

Resources mentioned in the show:

• Family Matters: Multigenerational Living Is on the Rise and Here to Stay

• GenWorth sites for advocacy: GenWorth.com and CareScout.com 
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Across the U.S., more than 2.7 million children are growing up in grandfamilies — families in which grandparents, other adult family members, or close family friends are raising children.

Generations United, with support from the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, created a brief and national comparison chart, Adoption and Guardianship for Children in Kinship Foster Care, which focuses on adoption and guardianship for children in kinship foster care, so that these children can exit foster care into permanent families.

In this episode, Ana Beltran, co-director of the National Center on Grandfamilies, is joined by Generations United's GRAND Voice Network Members Ms. Genia LaRese Newkirk and Mr. Keith Lowhorne.

Ms. Newkirk took guardianship of her niece, Nadia, after becoming licensed as a foster parent.  Ms. Newkirk had never met Nadia before and didn’t know about her.  They were not offered North Carolina’s Guardianship Assistance Program because the state limits their program to children age 14 and older, and Nadia is about 8 years old.

Mr. Lowhorne, with his wife, adopted three grandchildren from foster care in Alabama:  Kayren, about age 7; Kaiser, about age 6; and Harper about age 4.

Ms. Newkirk and Mr. Lowhorne talk about the options offered and not offered to them when they decided to keep the children in their lives out of the foster care system.

Ana offers resources for families in this situation.

Show resources
Adoption and Guardianship for Children in Kinship Foster Care: https://www.gu.org/resources/adoption-and-guardianship-for-children-in-kinship-foster-care/

Generations United: www.gu.org

The National Center on Grandfamilies: www.grandfamilies.org Support the show

Dr. Anita Rogers has been involved with the delivery of education, civil rights, human services, reentry programming, violence prevention, victim assistance and mental health in various capacities. As a development consultant, she has raised millions of dollars to help nonprofit and government agencies provide services to underserved populations, especially people of color. She now serves as a senior fellow at Generations United

Dr. Rogers joined Generations United's Executive Director Donna Butts for a discussion on civil rights work, how the activist landscape has changed, and the similarities between Black Power and Black Lives Matter.

Resources mentioned in the show: 


The Official Campaign of the CROWN Act
https://www.thecrownact.com
The CROWN Act stands for “Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair,” created in 2019 to ensure protection against discrimination based on race-based hairstyles by extending statutory protection to hair texture and protective styles such as braids, locs, twists, and knots in the workplace and public schools. 

Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH): https://asalh.org

Toolkit for those working with African American grandfamilies: http://bit.ly/AfricanAmericanGrandfamilies

Toolkit for those working with Native American grandfamilies: http://bit.ly/NativeGrands

Generations United: https://gu.org Support the show

Young Invincibles was founded by a group of students in the summer of 2009, motivated by the recognition that young people’s voices were not being heard in the debate over health care reform. In the years since, the organization expanded from a group run out of a school cafeteria to a national organization with offices across the country.

Their Executive Director Rachel Fleischer joined Generations United's Executive Director Donna Butts for a discussion on the various priorities and actions Young Invincibles are looking for the Biden administration to take on. This episode also focuses on ways of how the group expresses issues beyond partisanship and emotion, while still conveying their passion.
Learn more about The Young Invincibles at younginvincibles.org. Learn more about Generations United at gu.org. 
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